1
/
of
1
Champagne Cat
Hard Luck
Hard Luck
Regular price
$11.33 USD
Regular price
Sale price
$11.33 USD
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Quantity
Couldn't load pickup availability
In Hard Luck, Richard relates the sentimental history of his and his brother Tom’s childhood. a pair of scurrilous twins born in the late fifties on a new housing-estate called Prospect. Brought up in a world of pubs and allotments, where television is a novelty and the Welfare a frequent necessity, they live in a council-house called Timbuctoo with their devoted mother, Ellen, and Frank, the father who deserts them. After Ellen’s divorce, they take up matchmaking, leaving notes for the milkman and holding the rent collector, Mr Bannister, in reserve.
Their hilarious adventures continue in the Crab Apple Road Home, while their mother is in hospital. It is there that they learn the fateful results of the eleven-plus: Tom wins a place at St Saviour’s Technical High School, and Richard, failing, at Broadfield Secondary. Richard’s touching and comical attempts to reverse this inequality bring their childhood history to a close.
James Maw writes with an unfailing sense of period and social detail. His comic gift, coupled with an extraordinary portrayal of two mischievous boys, creates a novel as colourful and unique as Dicken’s “Oliver Twist” and Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”.
After its original publication in 1986, Hard Luck won the Society of Authors ‘Betty Trask Prize’, at the time the second largest literary Prize in Britain after the Booker.
James Maw's first novel, a prizewinner, is a blend of styles: Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and James Maw. It uses the childhood of a pair of twin boys, loosely based on Maw himself, to present a picture of post war England and its social attitudes and ill conceived social engineering. The humour is acid, acerbic, innocent, but very English. The tragedies are done in style. As the 1950s, 60s and 70s fade into history, Maw's book has become even more readable, if only that this eBook cover overcomes the Dickensian grey typeface of the original 1986 hardback.
Their hilarious adventures continue in the Crab Apple Road Home, while their mother is in hospital. It is there that they learn the fateful results of the eleven-plus: Tom wins a place at St Saviour’s Technical High School, and Richard, failing, at Broadfield Secondary. Richard’s touching and comical attempts to reverse this inequality bring their childhood history to a close.
James Maw writes with an unfailing sense of period and social detail. His comic gift, coupled with an extraordinary portrayal of two mischievous boys, creates a novel as colourful and unique as Dicken’s “Oliver Twist” and Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”.
After its original publication in 1986, Hard Luck won the Society of Authors ‘Betty Trask Prize’, at the time the second largest literary Prize in Britain after the Booker.
James Maw's first novel, a prizewinner, is a blend of styles: Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and James Maw. It uses the childhood of a pair of twin boys, loosely based on Maw himself, to present a picture of post war England and its social attitudes and ill conceived social engineering. The humour is acid, acerbic, innocent, but very English. The tragedies are done in style. As the 1950s, 60s and 70s fade into history, Maw's book has become even more readable, if only that this eBook cover overcomes the Dickensian grey typeface of the original 1986 hardback.
Share
